Jobs data
- Hires, quits and openings
- Jobs cut announcements
- Nonfarm payrolls
Narrator: It's a big week for labor data. Three major points:
The first main data point is the job openings survey that we get from the month of July. Now, this is an important statistic because it gives us a holistic view of the labor market. And there's three main series I like to track. There's the hires rate, the quits rate, and the job openings rate.
Animation: Chart shows quits rate holding steadily around 2% since 2024, hires rate holding steady around 3.3% since 2024, and openings rate holding steady around 4.5% since 2024. All three rates show declines since 2022.
Narrator: All have been telling a similar story over the past year, which is one of pretty remarkable stability. If you look at these three series, they really haven't broken their sideways move in a major way over the past year. So I'm really looking to see if there's a break in a trend, either to the upside or the downside.
Second major data point is the Challenger, Gray & Christmas layoff announcements.
Animation: Chart shows Challenger job cut announcements, with most recent months showing a decrease in announcements, down to 33,429 in July 2026. This is down from a high of 275,240 in March 2025.
Narrator: Now this is a company that tracks announcements across the economy, and we've seen some pretty significant moves to the downside recently. And actually in the most recent moth, layoff announcements fell to their lowest in two years.
That leads us, of course, to the jobs report that we get on Friday.
Animation: The most recent total nonfarm payroll data dipped negative, declining from growth of more than 200,000. Private sector nonfarm payroll growth was most recently also above 200,000 and also fell below 50,000 but remained positive. The data has fluctuated between positive and negative growth since 2024.
Narrator: Now, if you remember, in the prior month, there was a pretty significant downside surprise to job growth, and most of this was driven by what was happening in both the leisure hospitality sector, probably because of the World Cup, but also what was happening in government. If you take those out, private payroll growth was still positive, and it was actually relatively steady.
So we're looking for if there's an unwind from that, but also to see if there's any broader layoff activity that was hitting other sectors. I will say that August tends to be heavily revised, so I'm not so sure we should put so much weight on that jobs print alone.
But if we take the totality of the labor market data this week, it should give us the same picture that we've been seeing over the past several months, which is one of relative stability in the labor market.